The Best Story Is YOU!

The tabloids used to be kept in a rack away from the check­out line. I remem­ber, as a grade school child, when I noticed the rack being moved closer to the cash reg­is­ter. I remem­ber feel­ing a sense of shame by the sleazy look­ing cover pho­tos and the sto­ry­lines. By high school, the rack had made its way to the check­out line. It is still there. At the same time, the great nov­els gave way to pulp fic­tion and the crime genre. Every­one needs a story I sup­pose. Per­son­ally, I spent a lot of time in the spy nov­els of the Cold War era. For a num­ber of years, I enjoyed read­ing the great Russ­ian nov­els. Lately, I have not found much to grab and hold my atten­tion. It is not that I have given up read­ing — far from it. It is that I have found a bet­ter story — my own.
The com­mon obses­sion with celebri­ties is noth­ing new, but I find it pro­gres­sively tedious and demean­ing to the so-called “aver­age” per­son. There are bet­ter sto­ries right here in Sander­sville. You do not have to be a mem­ber of the jet set to have a great life. You just have to pay atten­tion to the episodes of your own jour­ney. Jesus was a cham­pion at acknowl­edg­ing but semi-ignoring the elite of his day. He was also more inter­ested in his friends’ per­cep­tions of him than that of the crowds or Herod. Most of all, he focused on his own unique sto­ry­line. From Car­pen­ter to Mes­siah could have been a great auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but noth­ing like that was writ­ten. He was too busy liv­ing it to write it. That writ­ing task would be left to oth­ers. Jesus had an uncanny way of bring­ing the ignored and despised into epic sta­tus.
The Woman at the Well is one of the key fig­ures in the Gospel of John. An out-of-the-way nobody ends up being most of a chap­ter in scrip­ture. Many oth­ers also played their parts and were included. A few fish­er­men and a tax col­lec­tor now have Uni­ver­si­ties named after them, and hos­pi­tals, and churches, and parks, and I think you get my drift. Any per­son fram­ing his or her life in the light of God’s meta-story can take on an inspir­ing sig­nif­i­cance.
You do not have to be nom­i­nated for saint­hood to embrace your own saint-story. Over the years, I have given funeral ora­tions for many peo­ple that have had lives of much greater sig­nif­i­cance than any­one in film. Most of them were only in the news­pa­per once — in their obit­u­ary. Right now, a really inter­est­ing chap­ter is going on in my life — right here in a small but amaz­ingly com­plex South­ern town. If you are look­ing for some great sto­ries, you do not even have to leave the city lim­its. You just have to lis­ten closely right where you are. The story is your own.